The women scientists of the Manhattan project (Part 1)

OOn July 16, 1945, if you lived in Alamogordo, New Mexico, you might have witnessed a great explosion never seen before – the first successful test of an atomic bomb, a burning cloud of mushroom that seems to be coming out of the new Mexican desert. And if you had lived near the test site, code-named Trinity, you may have participated in the Manhattan project, the research and development effort that would launch a nuclear arms race.

Those who were outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, had no idea that a secret city had been built in recent years. The same is true for two other research facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn. And Hanford, Washington, each with thousands of workers. Many of these employees were women who worked as nurses, lab technicians, housekeepers, secretaries or instrument operators.

Most did not know what their work was doing, only that it was for the war effort. But some of these women were scientists with PhDs and specialized knowledge in physics and chemistry. Working on the Manhattan project gave them opportunities that would otherwise have been denied and began to reduce the many barriers women scientists face. But the research they conducted was unproven, very secretive and very dangerous.

From the scientists who helped develop the first atomic bomb to the nurses and workers who supported them, this story is part of a two-part narrative detailing the often neglected story of women in the Manhattan project.

A fiasco of chianti

More than 40 scientists gathered on the balcony of the squash court on the campus of the University of Chicago. Above their heads were the stands of Stagg Field. Below was an orderly pile of dense black graphite bricks, some with holes drilled and filled with uranium washers. For two weeks, researchers and workers had stacked the bricks and formed the uranium oxide powder into spheres in 12-hour shifts. It was a secret job, but they did not have to worry about being interrupted by a match at the stadium; The president of the school suppressed the football program in 1939, claiming that the "infernal nuisance" reduced the prestige of academics.

Graphite was spreading everywhere, making lab coats hollow and taking the skin. Albert Wattenberg, a graduate student, later wrote to suppress all this. "About half an hour after the first shower, the dust in your skin's pores would begin to ooze."

In December 1942, the group gathered to see if the stack, as the name of the structure, would create a nuclear chain reaction. Little by little, physicist George Weil pulled out the control bars to control the reaction. The idea was to make sure that the battery is autonomous but not out of control. It took all morning, with the neutron counter, faster and faster as the levels went up.

The group broke for lunch and then tried again. Enrico Fermi, who was leading the experiment, looked at the instruments and called the instructions to Weil. Finally, he smiled and said, "The reaction is self-sustaining." For 28 minutes, he let it flow. At one point, Leona Woods (later Leona Woods Marshall Libby), a PhD student, approached Fermi and boldly asked, "When are we scared?

Tall and athletic, Woods had played his part in creating the stack, moving heavy bricks. Even while pursuing her doctoral studies, she managed to help regularly at her mother's farm, dividing "her time and allegiance between atoms and potatoes," according to Laura, Fermi's wife. The only woman to attend the story, Woods participated in the wine drops of a Chianti fiasco offered by Eugene Wigner. With the rest of the group that had not yet left the squash court, she put her name on the straw of the bottle. Wattenberg grabbed the bottle as a souvenir. Everyone was relieved but mastered and drained their paper cups silently. "The silence was more dramatic than if the words had been spoken," Woods wrote in his memoir. "Everyone thought – if we have not the Germans already realized the chain reaction? "

In fact, the Germans had begun the search. A few years earlier, in December 1938, chemist Otto Hahn had written to physicist Lise Meitner to explain the results of experiments that he and Fritz Strassmann had conducted in Berlin, bombarding uranium with neutrons. From Sweden, Meitner replied that she found Hahn's letter confusing, but not impossible. The chemists were concerned that Irene Joliot-Curie was on the same track and immediately sent an article to be published, claiming that uranium had been replaced by a totally different element, barium. A copy went to Meitner.

During the New Year, Meitner and his nephew Otto Frisch, also a physicist, went for exercise. As he slipped on cross-country skis, she started to pace. And if the force of the neutron lengthened the nucleus of uranium – if it had the constitution of a liquid drop – by narrowing in the middle until it separates? After some calculations, the calculations were checked. Shortly after, Frisch would experiment to confirm that nuclear fission was indeed possible.

The news spread quickly in 1939. Six years earlier, Leo Szilard had postulated that a phenomenon such as fission could trigger a chain reaction, where the energy created by one triggers the 39; another. Such a thing could be used in a weapon. The Hungarian physicist, who had left Berlin in 1933, the day before the Nazi closed the borders, did not want Germany to have such a destructive bomb. The forced exodus of hundreds of Jewish scholars, including Edward Teller, Hans Bethe and Szilard, weakened the German scientific community, but there were still people able to capitalize on Otto Hahn's early days.

Szilard and Eugene Wigner wrote a letter urging President Franklin Roosevelt to fund US research on such a device. Then they had him signed by Albert Einstein. Three years later, on December 2, Szilard shook hands with Fermi at the University of Chicago squash court, saying he "thought this day would be a dark day in the history of humanity."

Bone researcher

The Metallurgical Lab (Met Lab) of the University of Chicago is only one branch of the Manhattan Project, whose roots have spread from one ocean to the other and to the other. Canada: Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Hanford in Washington State, Los Alamos in New Mexico, not to mention Universities of Columbia in New York at the University of California at Berkeley. The Met Lab became acquainted in February 1942, just two months after Pearl Harbor.

To get the bomb before Hitler, the Manhattan project needed a massive workforce. Between 1931 and 1940, US colleges and universities awarded 14,476 doctoral degrees to men and 2,040 to women. Although they all had something to do with science, there were other war projects, such as radar, that required physicists, chemists, and biologists. But Fermi was a star and the physics community was well connected. People started to arrive.

The line from atom to bomb was neither straight nor clear. There were several problems and even more solutions proposed. What was needed was a way to enrich uranium, a place for purification of plutonium and an isolated place to design and build the bomb.

At Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence had a cyclotron that he thought could be reconfigured from his original goal of breaking atoms. Harold Urey from Columbia University proposed gas diffusion. Jesse W. Beams worked on a gas centrifuge method that looked promising. While these three options were focused on uranium, at the Met Lab, Arthur Compton was working with plutonium, which he said could also be used to make a bomb. James B. Conant, president of Harvard and scientific advisor to oversee the project in 1942, wanted to drive them all out. If American and British scientists could see the many routes to the weapon, he thought the Germans could too.

After completing her PhD in Physical Chemistry in December 1943, Isabella Karle took the Michigan train to Chicago to meet her husband, Jerome. A job was waiting for him at the Met Lab where he worked, although she never applied. All she knew was that she would be working with a new element, "which does not appear on the periodic table." It had been only three years since Glenn Seaborg first produced silver, radioactive metal, and nobody knew anything about it.

Met Lab researchers have started experimenting with it, trying to learn about its behaviors and characteristics. Using a reactor, they hoped to turn uranium into plutonium, and then find a way to separate the two elements.

Because of their unknown properties, scientists also wanted to know the health effects of element 94, its projected periodic number. It turns out that plutonium is a bone researcher. It accumulates like calcium and can cause cancer.

In order to get ready, Isabella Karle went to various Chicago libraries to learn about plutonium, but she found very close to the information on uranium. Although uranium is near the plutonium in the periodic table (element 92), the gap between their findings was 151 years; Martin Heinrich Klaproth described the uranium in 1789.

In the 1940s, we knew much more, including its radioactive properties. When Fermi built the Chicago stack, scientists were already aware of the difference between fissile and non-fissile uranium. Only the fissile type would maintain the Fermi chain reaction.

Natural uranium is mainly composed of two isotopes: U-238 and U-235. But it's not a 50/50 division. The fissile U-235 represents only 0.7%.

That is why so many methods of separation were at stake in May 1942. Leonard's electromagnetic process, the gas diffusion of Urey or the centrifuges that Beams used would allow to physically dissociate the two types of isotopes.

Blaboteurs

In September 1942, the situation was changing. In August, the Manhattan project became official and a month later, General Leslie Groves was in charge. Tennessee was where the project was to erect a facility filled with Lawrence's electromagnetic machines to separate uranium, while plutonium research would continue in Chicago.

Rose Mooney-Slater used to manage with limited resources and limit her research to tight deadlines. Although she directed the physics department of Newcomb College, her ability to conduct crystallography experiments was hampered by the lack of equipment at her school. To compensate, she spent her summers in other universities, getting results and publishing nine papers between 1934 and 1938. In 1943, William Zachariason, her former instructor at the University of Chicago, brought her at the Met Lab.

Seaborg then understood how to isolate the plutonium, but the quantities of available elements were very limited. Mooney-Slater has spent his time using X-ray diffraction to study the crystal structures of bismuth phosphate, a compound used in the plutonium separation process.

With specialists in chemistry, mathematics, biology, engineering, physics, etc., Met Lab's work could not be limited to a single discipline or building. Eventually, the project will occupy approximately 360,000 square feet of space around the campus. Site B was a laboratory transformed into a brewery and a brewery. Miriam Posner Finkle used her doctorate in zoology to study the effects of radiation exposure on small animals.

The name, Metallurgy Lab, was partly true but mostly a blanket. With more than 2,000 people working on the project, the secret was strictly enforced. Posters warned, "Do not be a blotter." Guards patrolled corridors where Laura Fermi, Enrico's wife, was not allowed. The women of the newly arrived scientists would choose their own direction – a projection of the Next of Kin propaganda film, whose theme can be summarized as follows: "a carefree speech costs life".

"So we got the message," said Laura Fermi.

Betty Compton, who screened the film for the wives, was married to Arthur Compton, the lab's manager. Because he was so determined to be able to discuss everything with her, General Groves gave him security clearance. It was almost unprecedented, unless both spouses work on the project, like Isabella and Jerome Karle, who studied plutonium at Met Lab. As she made plutonium chloride, her husband was trying to rid the element of any impurity. Starting with yellow flakes of plutonium dioxide, she transformed them into beautiful green jade crystals using a high temperature steam process.

Boomtown

The yellow flakes that were the raw material for Isabella Karle's experiments came from the Oak Ridge facility. When General Groves decided that the area, about 20 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., Would be suitable for the Manhattan Project, the government used a prominent area to seize land and move about 1,000 residents. Reba Justice Holmberg returned to his hometown after earning his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Tennessee, only to discover that the institution had taken over. His grandparents lost their farm. Some of his neighbors had left with such haste that they had left their animals, and they were now racing. Residents complained that they did not receive a fair price for the land. Still, Holmberg and many of his family members, including his grandparents, later found a job in Oak Ridge.

After the evictions, what was a small farming community was transformed. This was a large-scale construction project that involved not only the construction of a graphite reactor, an electromagnetic separation facility, a gas diffusion facility and a thermal diffusion facility. but also a coal-fired power station, housing and a shopping center. As the population grew, reaching 75,000 in 1945, tennis courts, bowling alleys, theaters, recreation rooms and other facilities appeared. It's 60,000 acres that you can not find on a map, a secret city.

"Of course, we do not call anything by its proper name. Absolutely, everything was coded or numbered, "said Anne McKusick later. "If we worked shifts and had to fill 7 to 14 traps, we were not even very aware that it was liquid nitrogen." The secret – even paranoia – was encouraged and strengthened. One day, your colleagues were there, the next day they were gone. Rumors circulated that "they spoke". Some Oak Ridge employees were asked to report on other people's activities. If you were asked to spy, did that mean someone was listening to your conversations?

Oak Ridge was growing so fast that people were queuing everywhere – the post office, the store, the library. Even when you could enter the store, it was likely that the grocer had no more butter, milk and milk. The list of complaints received by the City Manager continued, but, he tried to remind the residents, they were at war. Construction has been steady, trying to keep up with the pace of the expanding workforce. One of the factories, K-25, was a four-storey U-shaped building. Each rectangular wing measured 1 km long and 400 feet wide. To effectively cover as much ground, the foremen used bicycles to go from one end to the other.

The atmosphere of the prosperous city was enhanced by the expanses of mud, sometimes covered with wooden sidewalks, often not. A busy bus system helped workers move around the giant campus and return home. In some places, there were rows of houses of the same appearance, sitting on mud-covered mounds. Oak Ridge provided a variety of housing units: dormitories for single workers, prefabricated houses made of a mixture of cement and asbestos, trailers and barracks. The latter structures were substandard housing for white workers and African Americans. Four or five people shared the 16-foot by 16-foot rooms, which often had little more than beds and a stove. The windows were covered with screens and shutters but had no glass. The barracks were grouped around common bathrooms. The dwellings and cafeterias were separated, without any recreation, like the pools, offered in the white areas. Writer Enoc Waters called Oak Ridge "the first community I've ever seen with deliberately planned slums".

Instead of barracks, African-American nurses and nursing students were "grouped" into two-bedroom "Victory Houses", originally intended for entrepreneurs and their families. The women slept in bunk beds and in one case the kitchen was to be used as a dormitory when space was limited. Near Meharry Medical College, at least two of the nurses, Geneva Drake and Velma Hurd.

There was no single-family home for African Americans, so there was no way for husbands and wives to live together. Privacy was virtually impossible to obtain because 24-hour shifts meant that it was always time to go to bed, no matter what time. As a result, many African-Americans chose to live in Knoxville and commute, especially because there was no school inside the barriers that would admit their children.

Yellow cake

It took six weeks to settle Virginia Spivey Coleman's records. The young chemist already had her security clearance, but the administrators had not found her. In the meantime, she had to spend her days in the office with other people waiting for their background checks. While she was planning to do lab work, she decided to help some of the other women in the pen. Some were still teenagers. Some had neither electricity nor plumbing at home.

Although Coleman does not know exactly what they would work on, he was told that it involved instruments. What kind and what did they do? In this environment, it was better not to ask. Instead, she patiently explained concepts such as gauges, dials, and levers. Eventually, she found herself in the lab working with what she called Yellowcake. Using his real name, uranium, was forbidden.

The signs that warned silence were everywhere. One of them had three monkeys: do not see evil, do not hear evil, do not speak evil. "And I always thought it was really cute," said Gladys Evans, one of the calutron operators. "But [there was] a fine of $ 10,000 under each item if they took you. That and the prison.

Employee badges were more like driver's licenses, with each person's statistics (height, weight, age and eye color). These were color-coded and so it was easy enough to spot places where someone was not supposed to be.

The women Coleman left in the office went to Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant. This is where the calutrons were. These mass spectrometers were modifications to Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron and were used to enrich uranium. Sitting in the first person for the first time had to look like a passenger traveling in a cockpit. There were rows of tall metal cabinets, covered with dials, switches, and gauges.

Everyone did something, but the descriptions were hidden in code or jargon. Increase the beam or change the voltage. Empty the electronic box. Most of the time, it was simply to monitor the gauges and manipulate the button as it was a radio dial, so that the needle was exactly there. where she should be. These women were efficient, cooperative and maybe a bit bored. They had no idea what was going on under their feet, where the electromagnets were separating the U-235s and the U-238s, thus preparing uranium for an unprecedented weapon that would change the course of human history.

Visit DigitalTrends.com later this week for the second part of this story.